MARTINA LOPEZ

DIGITAL ALLEGORY

January 19 - March 29, 1999
Contact Sheet 100


Martina Lopez began working with her family's photographs as a way of reconstructing memories and exploring feelings of loss and change. From this series she created works dedicated to her father, mother, and her eldest brother who was killed in Vietnam when she was four years old. She remarked that many of the memories of her brother were, in part, constructed from his presence in family photographs. Working with snapshots from family vacations, Lopez began to stitch together new images of her family that would exist in an artificial space of her own creation outside of a specific moment in time.

In the most recent works presented in this exhibition, Lopez looks back on a very emotional year which saw the death of one of her brothers and the birth of her first child. She writes, "This blatant exchange of life and death made me question many things, the intangible human spirit, the miracle of birth, the passage of death, nature's role of the mother, and my own inner conflict of independence and the dependent child."

The Gifts of Life
1998

For Lopez the foundation of each series is autobiographical, but also states that "the specific stories are not necessary to understanding the work, but they are what drive their creation. My images have become a visual diary, a place where I come to terms with life." In her computer-assisted images Lopez presents us with an intricate mosaic fashioned from millions of individual pixels that create an allegory of life, death, and nostalgia, and like the memories and the photographs they reference, her images exist in their own temporal state.